"I'm not creating a flamewar.", Oh wait.. yes I am... Options

[MadiZone]

Excuse me but I just don't get why a first post like that (from MadiZone) has recieved answers regarding audio issues. As far as my limited intelligence allows me, he was obviously trying to start a thread regarding the sophism that lies into the Final Fantasy series and I totally agree with his excellent observation. You should also try to play Chrono Trigger for even more witty statements...      

Lady Yunalesca is incredibly beautiful and sophisticated, I'm glad you recognize that .
note : it was a quote posted in the MPC forum regarding hardware support. I was just using Yunalesca's quote. Some people found it offending, some mod splitted the thread.

This post has been edited by MadiZone: Feb 15 2003, 23:00

[MadiZone]

I wouldn't say that 95%+ of consumers can't distinguish 96kbps Vorbis from CD, simply because most just don't care whether they distinguish or not. Maybe 50-60% of all consumers or even more could if they tried or cared enough.

And there we got another obstacle.
Why would a commercial company want to support a high quality audioformat if it's consumersegment doesn't care about quality at all?
And "they're stupid" is not the answer.

This post has been edited by MadiZone: Feb 15 2003, 23:07

[p0wder]

Ok, some people are spending way too much time playing video games to be arguing about reality!

[floyd]

If there is a market for SACD and DVD-A (formats that probably only 1% of people, if any, could abx), there is certainly a market for mpc. The market is called: audiophiles, and if the mpc format was marketed correctly, there is no reason why it couldn't work. Of course, the promotion of DVDA and SACD have ulterior motives, and whether anyone will bother promoting a HQ format without odius DRM is a question that depends on whether you think the glass is half-empty or half-full.

[Canar]

Lady Yunalesca is incredibly beautiful and sophisticated, I'm glad you recognize that

Erm. No. She does not exist. Thus, she can be neither. The artists who drew her created an image that they attempted to make beautiful, and the writers who wrote her dialogue attempted to portray her as sophisticated.

If you wish to quote a videogame character, quote the author who wrote the dialogue. If that name doesn't resonate, there's likely a reason for it.

[SometimesWarrior]

When people hear "higher quality!!!" they think "ooh better!!!". MPC is teh higher quality. So iRiver can say "hey look we got teh higher quality!!!" and the customers will say "ooh i want teh higher quality!!!" and they'll buy it.

It's not hard to get people to want teh better quality. I have a few friends who used to just indiscriminately download MP3's, knowing that it's better to get 192k than 128k, and that's about it. I just played a 128k file, and then a rip of the CD with MPC Standard, and I said "look at teh higher quality!!11!!1!" and they said "yeh i see it!!!11!1!" and now they rip all their music with MPC.

MPC isn't as obscure as you think. Go to many other techie forums (Ars Technica for one), and even there a few people always say "rip CD's with MPC for teh higher quality!!!" whenever someone asks about audio. And if iRiver was the only company to support MPC-CD playback, they'd get thousands of sales, just for that reason. I mean, many of the active members at HA would run out and get one (myself included), plus many of HA members' friends and family members would get them too, plus all those thousands of people at other tech forums and their friends and family. And of course, anyone who's buying an audio player as a gift will look at the iRiver box and notice the big shiny seal that says "We got Musepack it is teh higher quality!!! MP3 ist death!", and maybe buy it for that reason too.

iRiver has two paths it can take when implementing MPC. It can release an unsupported patch which some programmer can slap together in not-too-long a time, which will be cheap to make and cost nothing to support, and will generate a few thousand sales from the enthusiast crowd. Or it can do heavier development, testing, promotion, and support, and make it a real selling feature.

Okay I'm out!

[MadiZone]

Lady Yunalesca is incredibly beautiful and sophisticated, I'm glad you recognize that

Erm. No. She does not exist. Thus, she can be neither. The artists who drew her created an image that they attempted to make beautiful, and the writers who wrote her dialogue attempted to portray her as sophisticated.

If you wish to quote a videogame character, quote the author who wrote the dialogue. If that name doesn't resonate, there's likely a reason for it.

Wrong. You're basicly saying you have to be a world famous person, otherwise your comments are not worth a dime.
Just like you can post movie quotes, you can post videogame quotes, and you credit them to the fictional character.

But go to the biggest database on movies (and now videogames) and look :
http://us.imdb.com/Quotes?0284110

Just where do you see
"Listen to my story, for I may not get another chance to tell it."
- John Brengman, Dialogue editor of Final Fantasy X.

The correct way of quoting it, is to quote it to the fictional character it belongs to.

Lara Croft is fictional as well, but she still has a surprisingly huge fanbase. (not that I'm one of them)
I don't see a lot of fans to are members of "The fanclub for the 3D Character Designer at Core Entertainment"

This post has been edited by MadiZone: Feb 16 2003, 11:27

[MadiZone]

When people hear "higher quality!!!" they think "ooh better!!!". MPC is teh higher quality. So iRiver can say "hey look we got teh higher quality!!!" and the customers will say "ooh i want teh higher quality!!!" and they'll buy it.

It's not hard to get people to want teh better quality. I have a few friends who used to just indiscriminately download MP3's, knowing that it's better to get 192k than 128k, and that's about it. I just played a 128k file, and then a rip of the CD with MPC Standard, and I said "look at teh higher quality!!11!!1!" and they said "yeh i see it!!!11!1!" and now they rip all their music with MPC.

MPC isn't as obscure as you think. Go to many other techie forums (Ars Technica for one), and even there a few people always say "rip CD's with MPC for teh higher quality!!!" whenever someone asks about audio. And if iRiver was the only company to support MPC-CD playback, they'd get thousands of sales, just for that reason. I mean, many of the active members at HA would run out and get one (myself included), plus many of HA members' friends and family members would get them too, plus all those thousands of people at other tech forums and their friends and family. And of course, anyone who's buying an audio player as a gift will look at the iRiver box and notice the big shiny seal that says "We got Musepack it is teh higher quality!!! MP3 ist death!", and maybe buy it for that reason too.

iRiver has two paths it can take when implementing MPC. It can release an unsupported patch which some programmer can slap together in not-too-long a time, which will be cheap to make and cost nothing to support, and will generate a few thousand sales from the enthusiast crowd. Or it can do heavier development, testing, promotion, and support, and make it a real selling feature.

Okay I'm out!

again. Go this forum, go that forum.
No. You go there, count the amount of people who is showing interest in Musepack, then count how many you think would be interested in an iRiver device if it supported musepack, and finally how many that you know for sure would buy the iRiver.
If consumers want higher quality, how come all these people rip at 128 kbit?
They think 128 kbit the maximum bitrate for the MP3 format?
That doesn't really make sense.
Of these people who download a 192 kbit rip instead of a 128 kbit rip, how many of them rip music them self?
Because if they have no MPC track to play - and currently, they're not getting any from KaZaa - what use would they have of MPC support? And these people, do they already own an iRiver or are they thinking about buying one? Maybe they think about getting a player if it had musepack, but how do we make them know that our player has musepack then? It's not like we have their e-mail adress and can just magicly let them know. Of course, we could trust that the HydrogenAudio forum and it's members would spread the news. But how many hifi-consumers interested in portables go HydrogenAudio or just forums in general?
Maybe they read the magazines for reviews instead.... or maybe they just go to their local electronics store to find a player that suits them.... If they just go to their local store, then the obvious way to get the message out about the Musepack support would be to have all packaging and manuals edited and reprinted and then send out to the distributors. But what about the units they already have? Should they be returned to be repackaged as well? Because they HAVE to know that it's there.

iRiver doesn't care if a lot of people like high quality audio. They care about if there's a significant consumersegment who cares about high quality, knows about musepack, knows about iRivers existance and have MPC support as their crucial criteria for placing a purchase on an iRiver player.

If's and possibly's are not of much use.

It's commercial speculation. If you can garantee that musepack support would be a commercial success or has a significant chance of becoming one, then you have a good chance of convincing the higher orders in iRiver.

Try to estimate a sales number, and try to estimate how much iRivers earns pr. unit they sell to the distributor. Now try to estimate what kind of licensing there could be involved (Í've never seen the MPC licensing thing clarified completely), and how much engineeringtime is needed. What the risks if using the format would be? I mean, could the owner of MPC come in 5 years, when iRiver has helped the format grow bigger and then raise the license price? Would loading an MPC decoder into the memory of the player, cause the player to start slower? Or consume more battery because more memory will be used?
How would the current customers like this?

A lot of questions.

This post has been edited by MadiZone: Feb 16 2003, 11:59

[Trelane]

This thread is teh low quality!!1!1~!!

[MadiZone]

This thread is teh low quality!!1!1~!!

If that's the best reason you can come up with, no wonder why Musepack is yet to be supported.

This post has been edited by MadiZone: Feb 16 2003, 12:09

[Trelane]

You need to lighten up, dude. Seriously.

You say you're not against Musepack at all, yet you seem hell bent on seeing it not supported in any hardware whatsoever. Give me a break.

[MadiZone]

You need to lighten up, dude. Seriously.

You say you're not against Musepack at all, yet you seem hell bent on seeing it not supported in any hardware whatsoever. Give me a break.

Wrong.
I'm mainly pointing out some of the issues, that people seem to completely ignore, either because they've forgot them, or because they think if they're not brought up - they're obviously not issues.

If you refuse to acknowledge reality, you're gonna have a hard time changing it.

And that's what the quote was all about.

"Hope is comforting" - It's comforting to believe that MPC support is around the corner.
"It helps us accept fate (reality)" - there is no MPC support.
"however tragic it might be" - and it's not coming.

You have to stop dreaming, and start doing something...
Or hope (expect) (know) someone else will do it for you.

Again - I'm not against Musepack.

This post has been edited by MadiZone: Feb 16 2003, 13:04

[Bedeox]

Oh well... is 'slapping a patch' costly?

Do you know about 'snowball effect'?
(One has it, his friends have it, friends of his friend, 10000 people use it...)

Without risk there is no gain! (In buissness at least)
If NOBODY tried to implement MP3 in hardware,
we would have no MP3/CD players.

[MadiZone]

Oh well... is 'slapping a patch' costly?

Do you know about 'snowball effect'?
(One has it, his friends have it, friends of his friend, 10000 people use it...)

Without risk there is no gain! (In buissness at least)
If NOBODY tried to implement MP3 in hardware,
we would have no MP3/CD players.

No one implemented MP3 before it was significantly known.
This mean, by the time the first MP3 player came out, MP3 was already very known across geeks.
Nearly every PC magazine had covered the subject in one or more articles, many websites hosted software for download that would allow you to create your own MP3 files.
Furthermore, MP3 established a new market.
It had nothing to compete closely with. It had the CD player, but there was no format to compete with. Not even RealAudio was a serious threat. Musepack has a format to compete with. The MP3 format, a format that is already WIDELY ESTABLISHED. If we rid the world of MP3, re-launched Napster, and made sure all the available CD-rippers had Musepack as default option, I could tell you for sure, that MPC hardware support was coming.

I know about the snowball effect, but keep in mind. Why me and you might be dazzled by the quality of Musepack, our friends might be more like "yea, that's cool - I'll use it", and some of their friends will be like "hmm, nice, but it doesn't have support - I'll stick to MP3, because I'm a bloody conservative".
So I think we should call it an echo effect rather than a snowball effect.

This post has been edited by MadiZone: Feb 16 2003, 13:17

[Guest_SK1_*]

OK enough is enough...
As said before "you need to lighten up dude"!
And indeed this thread is teh low quality...it's going completely nowhere, started from nowhere too.
MadiZone, instead of trying to come up with every possible reason in the world why MusePack hardware support won't happen (soon, not soon, whatever) and trying to make people think as (extremely) passimistically as you (and i thought I was pretty passimistic sometimes..) just lighten up and face the fact that things are not so simple, things happen because of different reasons all the time, no matter what imaginitive "rules" you think there are.

I say MPC support in portable/s will exist, don't know when, but when it will i'm very likely to buy the device.

[Moonwatcher]

regardless of MPC, i belive that someday we will have an open source firmware player, someone will have to fill that gap in the market sometime... the rest will be up to us.

[NeoRenegade]

Final Fantasy died with FF6, idiot.

Anything after 6 is bastardized because they're PSX-only releases.

MPC is great and it'll see the light, I think. Digital audio is progressing slowly, because of cheap sh!ts in the RIAA and elsewhere. But they can't halt development altogether. People are still opening their ears everywhere.

This post has been edited by NeoRenegade: Feb 16 2003, 16:36

[Peter]

for neo: http://www.rpgamer.com/games/ff/ff7/propag...ganda/junon.jpg
(server doesnt like external links i think, try pasting the url in new ie window)

[NeoRenegade]

I play games for gameplay, not cinematics, dumbass.

And in any case, haven't you noticed how generic the FF series is since FF6?

"Ooh, look at me, I've got an odd hairstyle, and what's this, a BIG SWORD? Ooh pretty..."

This post has been edited by NeoRenegade: Feb 16 2003, 17:05

[Peter]

and whats your problem with ff7/8/9 gameplay ? or maybe they're too big to download on your gay modem ?

[Bedeox]

That is REAL flamewar

(Actually, I don't like FF too much too. It's a good game, but not my style.)

[JohnV]

Lol.. this is teh low quality thread of the week if not the month..

Several people acting against the rules of HydrogenAudio... I don't think this thread needs to be open anymore. Closed.